Friday, May 2, 2014

I
am founder of
a legal search engine called Indian Kanoon (http://indiankanoon.org)
Indian
Kanoon provides state of art free search and free access to
Indian
court judgments to the common people.

Indian
Kanoon daily crawls different Indian court websites and adds the
set
of updated judgments for Supreme court and high courts to its
database.
Since court judgments do not have copyright protection,
Indian
Kanoon does not violate any copyright law.

Infact
Indian Kanoon provides just another portal for people to get
access to
court judgments and thereby allows more widespread distribution of
court
judgments. Restricting access to judgments in this particular
fashion
will hinder Indian Kanoon ability to provide access to Patna High
Court decisions and thereby in people to have easy access to court
judgments. Currently Indian Kanoon serves more than 2 million
users
every month.

Indian
Kanoon fills in many voids which exist in current Indian court
websites. Restricting access to judgments also forces people to
stay
with the court websites and force them to not use the law search
tools
provided by other providers like Indian Kanoon. I think providing
unhindered access to court judgments is in the interest of Indian
people
as they can use any research tools provided by any competitive
portal.
If such restrictions are removed, people can choose whichever
website
they like most.

If
the problem was in Patna High Court server getting overload
because of
Indian Kanoon crawling, I would like to state that Indian Kanoon
crawls
the websit eonly once at 12:00 AM IST when there is little chance
of
affecting any normal user on your website. Further, replicating
court
judgments on Indian Kanoon reduces the load on Patna court
servers
as many people can access the judgments directly on Indian Kanoon.

So I would kindly request you to remove captcha restriction on
Patna High
Court website.